I was hitching a ride to work today as I often do, and army radio was playing. They were talking about the upcoming Likud primaries and why Netanyahu put the Likud chairmanship up for grabs. One of the talking heads said something like this:

“Likud is very unlike the other parties because in Likud you generally do not run against a popular party leader. In Likud, it’s better to be on the leader’s side than against him.”

I was in the back seat, smiling wryly at the cute, clueless little pundits. “Tell that to Feiglin,” I murmured in the backseat, in Hebrew, hoping the driver would hear me and take the bait.

He didn’t even have to. Five seconds later, Moshe was already on the air, talking to the cute, clueless little pundits. “Hello Mr. Feiglin,” the pundit began.

“Hello hello,” Moshe responded, as always. And then, the predictable, ever-repeated, boring clueless-little-pundit question:

“Why are you running, Mr. Feiglin? You have no chance of winning.”

At this point, my wry little smile widened to an all out grin. I love this stuff!

When Moshe’s time was up, my ride starting talking. “Feiglin failed. He’s been failing for over 10 years. He won’t win,” he said. I became annoyed…for about 3 seconds. But then I asked him the following question:

“Are you a Likud member?”

“No, of course not,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “Then what does your opinion matter? You can’t even vote in this election.”

That’s when I realized, all the naysayers, all the people that keep saying over and over and over again that Jewish leadership is impossible, that Israel is condemned to be the world’s doormat forever, they are all out of this game. They don’t matter, because they’ve willingly silenced themselves by refusing to play. They never joined Likud, and are therefore irrelevant. The only people that matter are the Likud members, and those are the ones who DO believe, which is why they joined the game in the first place. This is why we will win. Everyone and everything else that says we can’t, the cute little clueless radio pundits and the nice driver guy, are just background noise who have no vote.

The most difficult dialectic in Judaism, I believe, is that between the inexorability of redemption and the Divine command to redeem ourselves. Why should we do anything if redemption is inevitable anyway? The answer is that it is not inevitable that the redemption of the Jewish people will just happen out of thin air. Rather, it is inevitable that the Jewish people will, as a nation, answer that Divine command and redeem themselves.

Over the next month and a half, Moshe Feiglin and the rest of us who believe in a real Jewish State, in our Jewish identities, and in the Jewish People’s destiny to repair the world under God, will have the wonderful opportunity to once again speak to this Nation. To explain to her that we are sick and tired of measuring the “strength” of our leadership by the amount of time it takes them to put out a diplomatic fire, or by how quickly they can appease Turkey before we lose another “ally,” or by how quickly he can scrounge up UN votes to scuttle yet another meaningless international condemnation and score another “victory” for the “proud” Jews.

To tell this People that we believe in them, we believe in our nation, we believe in ourselves and our duty to live in the land that God gave us, our right and duty to worship freely on our Holy Temple Mount, our Divine charge to speak to the Western civilization we, as Jews, gave birth to. A world now mired in profound economic and spiritual confusion, a world we must equip with spiritual and moral guidance where it is so sorely needed.

It will be a fun, exciting, therapeutic, even cathartic battle for both sides. We need to be calm and understand that nobody in the nationalist camp actually disagrees with us. Some simply don’t believe a destiny-driven Jewish existence is possible.

We will tell them, once again, that it is. And not only that, but that it is inevitable. Not that it will just happen randomly when the Divine egg-timer in the sky happens to go *bing*, but that it is inevitable that we will rise up as a nation and redeem ourselves, and God will be there with us when we do.

The only question is, are you, as a human being with free will, going to be part of it? Our numbers have gone way up since the last time Moshe ran in 2007, and all the naysayers can’t even vote. Don’t be distracted by the naysayers. They are just that: they have no say. They’re not in the game.

But you do have a say. If you want it. Go to Jewishisrael.org now and donate. Help us wake this People up and let’s show the world what the Jewish People can do!